Weblogs: Web Development Links
The end of an era -- Today (21st September 2011) is a very sad day for me. A few of my ex-colleagues and friends from Yahoo! Europe had their last day in the office today, after being made redundant. They represent the last of the European web development team.
Social Innovation Camp projects are go! -- Social Innovation camp takes place in London on April 5 & 6. A list of six ideas has now been published, and developers, designers are invited to come along and build these ideas on that weekend. Come along and be a part of a team that builds useful ideas! (disclaimer: Yahoo! Developer Network is sponsoring the event, I am an employee of Yahoo! Europe)
PlugLondon -- A developer meetup, with no PR, at the Skype London offices on the 8th December. Encouraging developers to get together talk, demo and show off the code they've done, as well as talk to developers from web companies about their APIs. And beer.
Usability myths and professionals -- Alastair runs into bizarre criticism for the statement: 'no usability guideline is black and white, and the context and users have to be taken into consideration.' Alastair demonstrates a quality that's thin on the ground in web development - a pragmatic skepticism, backed by real research. A piece worth some thinking time.
Leaving Yahoo! again -- Director of News, Sport and Information, Lloyd Shepherd is leaving Yahoo to go freelancing. I've enjoyed working on sites Lloyd directed, he has a lot of energy, insight and deep knowledge about what really works on information-related sites. Hopefully, we haven't seen the last of Lloyd - I look forward to the next opportunity to work with him.
Isn’t it time to stop the consortium/corporation bashing when talking about web standards? -- For webstandards speakers bashing large companies seems to be the cool thing to do. This seems to have reached a crescendo in the @media 2007 hot topics panel. Its a great pity that web standards advocates find this way of justifying their own existence. Some people talk, some people do. I'm glad I'm working with people that do.
Yahoo! UK Hack Day: 15th-16th June ‘07 -- Hackday is on 15th and 16th June 2007 in London, UK - organised by Yahoo! and the BBC. I'd love to see a group of Flash developers showing off their skills - showing the AJAX crowd how to really do a mashup. There are still a few places left (out of the original 500).
Progress -- Shelley Powers (about tech conferences): 'Hasn't anyone noticed a sameness to these events? How many people write after attending one of these that the only reason they go is for the hallway chat?'
Are you as good as Dean, Stuart, Jeremy or better than Dan and Peter-Paul? -- Rubuffing the one-dimensional characterisations of web developers, Christian has a thoughtful post about what makes an great developer. Passion, pragmatism and intelligent laziness still matter. Encouraging others to exceed is an interesting characteristic. IMO, truely great developers inspire others (not just encourage).
CSS: Browser testing order -- Andy talks about his Browser testing coverage. Starting with Firefox, then Safari, IE7 (using conditional comments to work around bugs), latest version of Opera (I read that as version 9), and if requested IE6 on Windows. Andy deliberately hides stylesheets from Mac IE5.x.
XSS (Cross Site Scripting) Cheat Sheet -- Comprehensive list of Cross site scripting attack vectors. Some interesting techniques.
Color Palette Generator -- Takes an image and returns a colour palette of what looks to be web-safe colours. Good for people with colour-matching deficiencies, like me.
Flash: Ten years, ten perspectives -- Aral Balkan: 'As far as rich Internet applications and occasionally connected applications are concerned, we will see a mass exodus as Ajax developers embrace the cross-platform support, simpler workflow, and elegant toolset provided by Flex.'
User Interface Design Principles for Web Applications -- User centred design is about designing for the user, not what the client thinks the user is. Aral provides an excellent list of usability guidelines to think about and approaches to adopt. Quite a fair bit is common sense, but that common sense that deserts us when a project and deadlines are written up.
Opera: Browser JavaScript Explained -- Opera 9 has the feature/habit of overwriting certain sites JavaScript as a means of making it work in Opera 9 - and then updating corrections on a weekly basis. An understandable idea, but makes it tricky for sites to fix their own JavaScript without impacting Opera 9 users (at least until Opera push out its weekly corrections). At least there's an email address to inform Opera of corrections.
Yahoo! Graded Browser support chart -- Grade a browsers: IE7, IE6, IE5.5, Netscape8, Firefox 1.5 (assuming that also means Firefox 2.0?), Firefox 1.0.7, Mozilla, 1.7.12, Opera 8.5 (presumably 'and above'), Safari 1.3 and Safari 2.0
Multi-Safari -- Running multiple versions of Safari side-by-side. (via Backup Brain)
Neko (Virtual Machine) -- 'Neko is an high-level dynamicly typed programming language. It can be used as an embedded scripting language. It has been designed to provide a common runtime for several different languages.' - running PHP on the VM faster than native is one of the goals.
Making the case for PHP at Yahoo! -- A presentation that highlights how Yahoo adopted PHP back in 2002. Looking at how the architecture evolved from the very start.
Fifty ways to take notes -- Lots of web references to online note-taking applications. The web-based ones look very interesting.
Creating colour palettes -- Malarkey demonstrates a simple way of generating complementary tones and shades when there's only one or two main colours to work with.
Colour Palette Creator -- A little tool that generates 10 shades of a base colour from a single hex colour
Waterfall 2006 -- The Waterfall methodology of creating applications is back with a vengeance. Look out for the incredibly interesting topics under discussion, for example Kent Beck (of Junit fame) on 'wordUnit: A Document Testing Framework', and the increasingly popular '
PEAR: Manual installation -- Manual installation of PHP Pear modules to shared web hosting space, as well as how to add the path to the PEAR files to the PHP include path in your PHP script
Tar file management with PHP Archive_Tar -- Using the PEAR package to create and manipulate tar files. This package also supports gzip and bzip compressed tar files. This is a good start for cross-platform data archives for web applications
Simple Test for PHP -- A neat and simple package for unit testing PHP scripts
colourmatch redux -- pick shades of RGB and it delivers a useful palette of related colours.
Web bugs for job scheduling: hack or solution? -- A method for running long jobs without the browser hanging around.
The New Face of Flash -- Andy Budd talks about Flash web applications. The evidence that Flash is proving itself as an application platform is growing.
PHP Form Validation System: An Object-Oriented Approach -- A PHP equivalent of Struts ActionForms for validating form data
Cheat Sheet Roundup - Over 30 Cheatsheets for developers -- via kayodeok
Older versions of the Flash play Archived Macromedia Flash Players available for testing purposes -- Looking for and found a Flash 5 player
Successful Strategies for Commenting Code -- An excellent analysis of how to effectively comment code
URL rewriting -- Using Apache mod_redirect to rewrite URLs invisibly and force redirects
Regular Expressions Reference Sheet -- Excellent basic level reference
Caching output in PHP -- caching wrapper around an existing script. Uses ob_start(), ob_get_contents() and ob_end_flush()
mod_rewrite Cheat Sheet -- Also includes allowable regex expressions - all on one page (via kayodeok)
Centering a block horizontally -- Using conditional comments to insert an extra div for IE5-
Password Hashing -- PHP functions and an overview of hashing algorithms
XML Pull in PHP -- Lightweight method of getting data and structure out of XML streams
Web Development Bookmarklets -- Fascinating and useful selection of bookmarklets for web developers
Templates and Template Engines -- It's time to expose the Deadly Sins of Templating and show why projects such as Smarty and patTemplate have completely lost the plot
PHP and DOM: The Way of the Widget -- Perhaps a useful way of getting struts taglib type templates in PHP
Permanent redirect in PHP -- Location header not sufficient. Need to add HTTP 301 status response
ECMOD Awards -- Malarkey has won ECMOD 2004 (European Catalogue and Mail Order Days) Best Charity/Good Cause Related Catalogue Award for WWF UK. Congrats!!
Web content management depends on trust -- The foundation of a brand is built by being useful and trustworthy.
On GMail and DHTML architecture again -- The idea is to fetch an HTML skeleton, decide what content you need, fetch that (as XML), and cache it wherever you get a chance. Render incrementally.
Using personas to create user documentation -- effective technical writing
The Elements of Style -- classic reference book
The Parrot Primer -- under the skin of the Virtual machine for Perl 6 and Python
Wiki Markup Standard -- Profile of wiki formatting
CSS designer cluelessness in a nutshell -- Raymond: answers of the form 'you can override the designer's preferences by jumping through hoops' show the wrong attitude
A rant -- Why are CSS designers so utterly freaking clueless? -- Eric Raymond on pixel sized fonts
The Joel Test for Web Development - Part 3 -- developers don't know how to use office phones, decent hardware and testing
The Joel Test for Web Development - Part 2 -- bugs, schedules and specifications
The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code -- punishment for breaking a build - babysitting to build.
The Joel Test for web development -- version control and automated builds
The Template Toolkit, Part One -- Randal Schwarz on the usefulness ot Template Toolkit
Like a Phoenix From the Ashes: X3D and the Rebirth of Reason -- 'The truth behind VRML's demise is plainer, simpler and uglier than this convoluted logic: we were too early, and the products sucked'
Long live line length -- 30 - 35em again
Ideal line length for content -- 30 - 35em
Virtual Hosts for Dummies -- Dave Shea's guide to multiple websites on a local Apache install
Ticked off links reloaded -- Improvements
Damage in Web Design -- Veen: Bad design is based on the arrogant and extremely difficult attempts to modify user behavior
The Web Developer's Copywriting Guide -- plain English guide to good copy
How To Identify Effective Color Schemes: More Color Matching Tools -- collection of useful tools
Planning a usable website: A three-step guide -- visitor needs, information flow, usability testing
Perl Design Patterns -- Monster collection of programming idioms
MozillaNews interviews Daniel Glazman, NVu developer -- some background and thoughts about NVu.
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